Back to School Lament

To everything there is a season. Right? That’s Bible truth, right there, though I admit I seldom read Ecclesiastes beyond chapter three. Sometimes I need the reminder that there is a time to be born and a time to die…a time to weep and a time to laugh…a time to be silent and a time to speak…

A time to set aside backpacks and a time to take up your backpack. (I’m pretty sure that Solomon would have written that, had backpacks been invented.) A time to head to the closest big box store and buy school supplies. A time to admit that summer is over and a time to lament that fact. A time to rejoice that routine will once again rule the day and a time to long for spontaneity. A time to set the alarm clock so no one misses the bus and a time to sorrow for the lost time you have together.

Right about now I’m pretty focused on the sorrow for the lost time together. There were years, though, when I didn’t feel that way. Letters would arrive from the school revealing names of my children’s teachers, and I’d rejoice over the light at the end of the summer tunnel. I anticipated sitting alone on the couch and drinking an entire cup of coffee before it got cold. Or reading a book without interruption. Or taking a nap just because I could.

Now I find myself wishing I could hang on to the crazy a little longer. And who cares about cold coffee? I can reheat it in the microwave.

A time for every season, indeed.

Back-to-school sales started weeks ago. I’ve avoided big box stores for that very reason. I don’t want to be reminded that I need to buy notebooks and pens and one of my kids needs a new backpack, but I can’t remember whom. I don’t want to be reminded that our middle child will be a senior. I don’t want to be reminded that our youngest is now old enough to play tennis and begin Confirmation class.

I just want to hang on, a little longer, to their childhood. I want to cuddle together on the couch and read piles of picture books. I want to turn pudding into finger paint. I’d even watch more Veggie Tales if asked to do so, and I’d do it with joy.

But that Bible truth remains: There is a time for every season.

And so I will remind myself, come the first day of school, that the time to plant and the time to uproot are equally valuable. That, at the end of the day, the time to embrace follows the time to refrain from embracing.

After all, He has made everything beautiful in its time (Ecclesiastes 3:11, NIV).

Gretchen O’Donnell is an island girl living on the prairies of southwestern Minnesota, with her husband, two youngest children, and two argumentative cats. She is eternally glad that the back-to-school supply list for her kids now consists only of paper, pens, and the occasional calculator, but is sad that her children no longer have to buy scissors just when they’ve come out with cutely patterned scissors. Gretchen does freelance writing for her local newspaper and has a weekly faith-based newspaper column, The Disheveled Theologian. She loves telling stories of her ordinary life to help people see the theological truths in their own everyday lives.